Made With Color Presents: Kristin Bauer Turns Words Into Art

Beautiful/Decay has partnered with premiere website building platform Made With Color to bring you some of the most exciting contemporary artists working today. Made With Color allows you to create a sleek mobile/tablet optimized website that is easy to use with just a few clicks and no coding involved. This week we bring you the works of Arizona based artist Kristin Bauer.

Kristin Bauer wants you to not only read her artworks visually but literally as well. Working in a wide array of media from neon to assemblage to painting, Bauer combines and mixes high and low iconography, imagery, and texts that will make you play a mental game of connect the dots. Unlike most stories however, Bauer’s works aren’t supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end – leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks between her references to anything from Renaissance sculpture to Jayne Mansfield, Shakespeare to Spielberg films, The Great Gatsby to Cheap Trick.

About her work she states:

I am influenced and inspired by the nature of how humanity derives meaning when presented with the combination of word and image. Our culture is highly visual, and rises and falls with the crests and waves of marketing and propaganda. I draw from my background in Masters studies of Psychology and Therapy practices and my related interests in Social Influence Theory as well as my love of music, film, classical literature and pop culture.

While some of my art seems socio-politically subversive, I do not have a concrete message with the work. Rather, what I am after is the dialogue and internal response of viewers that arise from how they put together visual and written information.